@BruceNV I read it as the people who hang out on East Fremont and specifically The Beat and Emergency Arts. I've only been in town a couple of weeks but this article matches up pretty well with my experience.

"We are entering a world of iteration and optimization, but the breakthroughs are behind us."

lol

I see your Pando posts follow the same recipe as Bleacher Report. Troll your audience with a provocative headline and write a story to match the headline, whether or not you actually believe any of it is irrelevant. Now all you need to do is take the opposite side of all of your posts under a pseudonym and the circle will be complete.

@nocleverhandle Yahoo promoted a guy to CEO who lied on his resume and that lie was only discovered and outed by a hedge fund who wanted him out as CEO. How many other people in lofty corporate positions and in the rank and file of big companies also lied and just didn't get caught? The answer is tons. Tons and tons.

So while I agree with your sentiment, in reality it works differently. A huge % of people lie on their resumes and are never caught.

@bgoldberg Most people would try to spin it into a positive. For people like you and Mark Zuckerberg it looks good, as you've gone onto great things. But for some guy trying to get a sales job who probably dropped out of college or something, lying on the resume is standard operating procedure - as is getting nervous when quizzed on the items you've lied about.

None of this is any indication of how people are likely to do on the job. Particularly a sales job - where top performers likely did party their asses of in college, if they went at all.

I'm not sold on the fact that your read on that guy was accurate. If you had hired him and it turned out badly, then maybe you could make the case. But everybody on your team and his experience said he was a winner, so he may well have been one on the job.

My impression from reading what you wrote is that he didn't have a college degree and lied about it - and one could certainly make a good salesman and had done that. Not everybody is confident (or stupid?) enough to put things like 'failed investment banker' on their resume.

After reading the headline I came to post that one of the main reasons I've been comfortable building our entire product development ecosystem in Asana (aside from the fact that it's fucking awesome) is because I know there is no way they're going to get acqhired and sunset the product. There is an implicit guarantee, that can be trusted, that they're going to keep making Asana awesome for years and years. Very happy to see you devoted most of the article to that. You are 100% correct.

Keep up the great work guys! I am eagerly awaiting the day we have enough employees to get to pay you to use it. I have no doubt you'll have been a big part of the reason we got there.

After watching the interview and cringing multiple times at how clueless those two are I think Mr. Carr is correct that them calling themselves VC's is laughable. As usual though, the way in which he worded the post shifted the focus from any reasonable point he may have had to what an asshat he is.

An infant, a duck, a robot, an infant robot duck and you don't all have millions of dollars to invest in startups. If you did you would have the first prerequisite met. Since you don't, this post is absurd. Nice to see you have the self-awareness to properly identify your peer group though. That's the first step.

I agree it does a good job of incentivizing people to stick around, how do you prevent being pushed out of your own company though? This type of structure gives incentives to stakeholders to force people out to prevent all of their shares from vesting.

Thailand is wide open for a ______ of Thailand for nearly everything. The internet as a business platform is basically ignored relative to most other countries with an economy of its size. Just have a look at the most popular sites in Thailand on Alexa and you'll see everything that isn't a global website (i.e. Facebook, Google, Youtube etc) is at least five years behind the times. As an example see what is basically the Tencent of Thailand, pantip.com. It looks like it was built by a high school hacker in 1999 - or prakard.com (craigslist real estate of Thailand), same thing - really simple website that dominates the market simply because nobody cares enough to build a competitor.

Perhaps the best internet company to have ever come out of Thailand was started by a foreigner, agoda.com, now owned by priceline.

I think you are dead wrong about this being a space that will only be appealing to 'bottom feeders'. In the current system all but the very best over-subscribed companies are unable to get favorable deal terms that leave them completely in control (think Facebook and how Zuckerberg will still be in near-total control after the IPO. That was only possible because there was SO MUCH investor competition every time they raised money).

Faced with the choice of crowdfunding with amazing terms or taking VC/Seed/Angel money and much less favorable terms, I think many A1 startups will go the crowdfunding route. They'll be able to demand terms that no VC would give them and avoid being thrown out of their own companies or giving up too much equity etc.

The mere existence of this other option will also give founders more leverage in dealing with investors. 'You demand these unfavorable terms? Fine, we'll crowdfund it'.

It may be a wild west situation from the beginning, with lots of investors getting burned and surely some getting some amazing deals as the founders will be just as inexperienced at all of this as the small investors - but overall I think it will be a huge win for the startup ecosystem.

One suggestion: hit them with at least one question that forces them to admit something hard or bad. They allude to it with the higher highs and the lower lows, but they didn't talk about the lows at all. You might have to really dig to get founders to admit something like this, because they want to always be positive and selling themselves - but thats going to make for the best reading. We want to hear about those horrible days too when they are doubting everything etc. Thats a key part of the process.